Doppelganger Read online

  The elevator door opened and they started the long walk up the gradually inclined corridor, eventually passing through the heavy titanium door that stood like the entrance to a great bank vault—a bank that held the fate of time and history itself within its hidden chambers. Once through, Paul watched the great door slowly swing shut and seal itself, the heavy metal locking mechanism clinking into place.

  “Well, Admiral Dorland? Did you find it?” It was Maeve, hands on her hips, staring them both down with the light of battle in her eyes.

  “Oh, he made it there and back again alright,” said Nordhausen. “But wait until you hear this!”

  * * *

  Maeve Lindford was truly shocked by all she had heard. A Russian ship at large in the history of WWII, and wreaking havoc with every missile it fired. The consequences that could result from this were overwhelming, and the thought that it was her job to sort that through was maddening.

  Outcomes and consequences—that was her mission in life these days. The dangers inherent in the enterprise of time travel, once only speculation about contamination and fateful effects, had suddenly been made painfully obvious to her. She had an odd feeling that there was something amiss in this whole equation—something she could not quite work out in her probability algorithms, and it irked her like a shirt that needed ironing. It sat like unwashed dishes on her kitchen countertops, and waited like an unpaid bill on her desk—things that she would never allow in the carefully managed space of her own personal life, for Maeve Lindford was a most meticulous woman.

  She kept everything in quiet order, and the structure of her world was wholly predictable at any given moment. The steady certainty of her life had been something in which she took great solace—something of her own making. It was an extension of her considerable will power, and the determined competence she thrust against any problem the world would dare to concoct for her. Up until now she had been quite content in her world, with outcomes that were wholly satisfactory—until this latest incident threatened to turn the entire project on its head, and the world right along with it.

  Time travel, it seemed, could be quite untidy.

  Something was happening now that none of them had a handle on. That uncertainty had become a real feeling for her at that moment—not just a nagging, misplaced cipher in her math. It settled into her with a pulsing beat of anxiety, and it never quite went away, like a thrumming of adrenaline in her chest. The world was not the way she always fancied it to be. Now, nothing was certain; nothing fixed and determined—not even the past.

  For someone who had always labored to define clear and well established borders, this defiant ‘quantum uncertainty’ in time travel was a daunting and frightening prospect. Heisenberg, damn him, was right. He predicted that physical quantities and properties fluctuate randomly, and therefore can never be accurately known. While the effect of this uncertainty was most evident on the sub-atomic level, where things like the speed, spin, and charge of particles could be highly unpredictable, the fact remained that this basic uncertainty was at the core of all reality—if that term could be applied in any meaningful way. Put simply: nothing was written. She realized now that she hated the whole notion inherent in that statement.

  Nothing was written; nothing forbidden, and everything was permitted. That was the chaos that now sat hunched in the center of her mind like an old, unwelcome hobgoblin to plague her thinking. She wanted it out, wanted it gone, wanted things wrapped in nice neat boxes again, and stacked up just so. But the world would never be that way for her again. All of her careful habits, all the meticulous checks and balances that governed her life, were futile efforts at imposing order on chaos. It was very unsettling, to say the least.

  Perhaps there was something in the human heart that reached for a truth that was unalterable. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, wrote Keats, or what’s a heaven for? Knowing, or believing that there was something out there that was fixed and permanent, had long been a comfort to the human soul. Now the Arch had proved that anything was possible, and any semblance of truth, as she once knew it, was gone from her life. She had firm ground under her feet when she walked into the Lab that night, but now all was quicksand. Nothing was certain, not even the comfort of finished, printed text in the books that she so loved all her life.

  She remembered how they had started that first night with an argument about Shakespeare. They were going to test their theory by simply going to see the original showing of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and she was worried that Nordhausen’s wayward curiosity might contaminate the time line. The man wanted to go nosing about Shakespeare’s office, and she resolved, then and there, that he would not set one foot out of her sight if the Arch actually worked. It wasn’t merely Nordhausen’s eccentric temperament that she was determined to set a watch on—it was Shakespeare! The thought that the professor might do something to alter a single word of that man’s verse was the most compelling argument anyone could make against the time project that night. If Paul’s theory was correct, then a carelessly spoken word to a stranger in the past, a heedless stumble in the dark, a mislaid object, could wreak havoc on future time. It would be as if Shakespeare ‘never writ.’ The most maddening thing was that they might not even know what they had done to alter the record of time. Things would simply change—just like Lawrence’s narrative in The Seven Pillars. She would reach for The Tempest on her library shelf one night and find it missing, gone, annihilated. Worse yet, she might never know the damage was done.

  The thought that every book in her library was now subject to sudden revision had become a seed of a deep discomfort, and it was growing in her with each day that passed. She could lose any one of them: Bronte, Whitman, Keats, all blown away with the slightest breath of time. That volume of poetry she had been reading last night—would it be the same tonight? It was more than unnerving to her now, it was frightening. It wasn’t merely words and books that could change on a whim, it was everything. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle had finally come home to roost.

  She remembered how she had confronted her greatest fear at the end of their first mission. Robert and Paul were still flushed and dizzy with the elation of their return. The Arch was a scintillating montage of light, and the generators were whining as they strained to provide the power required for the retraction jump. She recalled the excitement she had first felt with Robert’s return. Then Paul came through and everyone was safe at last. She had the barest moment of relief before that odd rumble shuddered through the Arch, like a ghostly train passing in the night. A howling sound droned in its wake, and she felt the fear gather strength within her.

  Things were different.

  Something had changed, and she could feel it like a shift in the weather, a faint, yet palpable variation in the certainty of her life. Something had changed. Heisenberg was running wild, and everything was different now.

  Time travel was dangerous. Meddling could easily twist the continuum into a confounding loop of Paradox, and when that happened, something lashed out at anything that did not belong on the changed Meridian. Paul tried to explain it to them once. He said that the notion of Paradox was so insulting to time that she would find a way to punish the offenders for their mischief. Paradox was not a mind-puzzle, but a real effect. It was a cleansing and healing force of time that promised nothing less than annihilation for all those who would dare to meddle, engulfing them in the quantum foam of uncertainty, and sucking them away to oblivion.

  As much as she tried to put the strange notions in her head aside, that gnawing uncertainty persisted. Now they had discovered that even their own time line had been an altered meridian! Everything she had taken for granted all her life, the history she had fought so stubbornly to defend, was actually just the result of someone’s capricious meddling in time. But who was the real culprit? This time it looked to be the Russians, but this business Paul had turned up concerning these keys added another very unexpected twist. Keys, each associated with rifts in t
ime, and found as artifacts embedded in something as old as the Selene Horse of the Parthenon! Who put it there, and why?

  Someone was in her kitchen, rattling the plates and dishes of all the events in her cherished china cabinet of history. Cups and plates were shattered on the floor, and that awful feeling returned—she could never be certain of anything again.

  Heisenberg be damned!

  Chapter 14

  “What can we do about all this?” said Maeve, the frustration evident in her voice. “You’re telling me that all these snippets we’ve been getting in the Golem data stream were actually real events? Those ships are still back there? Modern warships are setting off nuclear weapons in 1941? My god, isn’t the war revving up outside enough for them? They had to go back and do this?”

  “Calm down,” said Kelly, trying to tamp down her emotion.

  Maeve flashed him a dark glance, and then bored in on Paul again. “What’s going on with these keys, Paul? They’ve got something to do with all of this. That’s why you felt so compelled to go back and try to fetch this one, and to see those damn battleships again. What’s going on?”

  “Yes,” said Paul, thinking. “The keys…. From what I’ve been able to learn, the one I found was not the only one. This Fairchild woman had another key in her possession, and she claimed it was somehow responsible for the movement of her ship in time.”

  “The key?” Maeve shook her head. “How would it accomplish that? It took us years of research, all this investment of time and technology and equipment to get a functioning arch complex here and actually prove your theory could work. How does this woman simply upstage this whole project with a goddamned skeleton key?”

  “I don’t know, but I think this is physical—not a technology based effect.”

  “Physical?”

  “Yes, she claimed they had discovered physical rifts in time, fissures, and that they were secured by these keys.”

  Maeve’s eyes narrowed. “Rifts in time? You mean like that Oklo well you fell into in the Jordanian desert, the one that sent you right back to the time of the Crusades?”

  “Perhaps,” said Paul. “We had no time to discuss the details, because I knew my shift allocation was running out and Kelly was about to pull me out. The Oklo reaction was something the Assassins set up, as a way of operating off the time grid, as it were. No. I think this lady was referring to something more, something unplanned by the Assassins or anyone else in the future—some natural event that had caused time to fracture.”

  “The Russians!” said Nordhausen excitedly. “Remember that research I turned up concerning their nuclear testing program. I told you it looked suspicious.”

  “Yes,” said Paul, “that may be part of it. Those effects could be considered physical, like the EMP effect they also discovered associated with nuclear detonations. Yet I think this lady was intimating there was something else in play here, not caused by the Assassins, or the Order, or anyone else deliberately moving in time. I’m thinking there was some natural event that fractured time. That Russian research you turned up may have been a good clue, Robert. Think… Suppose large detonations have the side effect of fracturing time. They don’t just disturb space, they disturb the whole thing—spacetime. That’s where we live, correct? We don’t just live in space, we live in time as well—spacetime. Suppose highly energetic natural events like that have an effect on spacetime? Hell, we already know gravity can warp and bend space. Why not time? And what you can bend, you can also break.”

  “Fissures…” Maeve folded her arms. “And you say these keys are associated with time distortion?”

  “That’s what I was coming round to. This Fairchild lady said that there were others—other keys—and that she believed they were engineered in the future, which is exactly what I concluded about that key I found.”

  “If these rifts in time exist,” said Maeve, “then why haven’t we discovered them? There’s nothing in the Golem data fetches about any of this.”

  “Yes?” said Nordhausen. “And there was nothing known about King Tut’s tomb for centuries either, until it was finally discovered.”

  “Right,” said Paul. “These rifts exist, but we haven’t discovered them yet. At least if they are known to anyone in our time, that information remains unknown to us—a secret. Lord knows there is a whole encyclopedia of things that fall into that category.”

  “Well how does this Fairchild woman know about any of this? What is she doing with that key?”

  “She said it was entrusted to her—that she had received instructions. I got the distinct impression that their presence there was not an accident, and she alluded that it had something to do with that key, though I never got the details. There’s one thing I do know—she was looking for the key aboard Rodney.”

  “Aboard Rodney?”

  “Yes, she said they just weren’t quick enough. They couldn’t get to the ship in time, and Rodney was sinking. I think she was on a mission of some kind, to recover that key.”

  “You say she got instructions? From who?” Maeve was digging now, wanting to get to the bottom of this trench.

  “I never found that out, but I’m going back.”

  “What?”

  “Well I have to go back, Maeve. This whole thing is still up in the air. This Nexus Point is wide open. I told them to look for me in the Azores on the first of August. That will be an easy shift to target. I can go back again, and with adequate time to talk to them and answer these questions.”

  “Why that date?”

  “It was a decent interval ahead, and beyond the interference that might be setting up with Paradox time. You know that’s risky. There’s trouble brewing there around July 28th, the moment that ship first arrived in the past. The Golems were all over that date. It was the first big variation flag discovered by Golem 7. So I wanted to get beyond it. If there is Paradox in the offing, the effects should have already passed by August first.”

  “You were lucky that you phased correctly this time. Are you sure about this? Another shift, and that close to Paradox Time?”

  “Yes. I know the risks, but this is urgent now—imperative. Don’t you understand? If this is true, if these fissures or rifts this woman talked about are real, and they were caused by a natural event, then we could be looking at something very serious here—fatally serious. These natural rifts in time could be progressing, developing even as we speak. We could be looking at an ongoing event—the fragmentation of the entire continuum!”

  That lit a fire under them all, and Nordhausen was quick to the research station, a hundred questions needing answers. “Alright, let’s start with this new ship—Argos Fire,” he said. “It was a corporate security vessel, a Daring class destroyer purchased from the British government by a company called Fairchild Enterprises. I not only found the data on that in the history module, the damn ship was on the news this morning.”

  “This morning?”

  “CNN. They say it was reported missing off the coast of Greece, leaving two oil tankers stranded there without escort. There was speculation it might have been sunk by the Russians.”

  “The Russians again,” said Maeve. “Could this whole thing be planned? Deliberate?”

  “You mean the disappearance of Kirov in the Norwegian Sea? That’s possible,” said Paul, “but I think that was probably an accident. It was determined the submarine Orel blew up, and they thought it took Kirov with it.”

  “Yes, until the damn ship re-appeared in the Pacific,” said Nordhausen, running his hand over his well balded head. “There was quite a mystery surrounding that. NATO couldn’t believe they could have failed to track that ship all the way to the Pacific.”

  “Right,” said Paul, “I recall that now. It was discovered by the American Submarine Key West, and then it returned to Vladivostok. After that, things began to deteriorate when the Chinese started quarreling with the Japanese over oil drilling rights, and then everybody and their dog got into it.”

  “Wel
l this Argos Fire was fetching oil in the Black Sea, and that was the same ship involved in that engagement with the Russian Black Sea Fleet a couple days ago.”

  “Look,” said Maeve. “We need to consider the possibility that the Russians may have discovered some way to move in time. I know that incident with Kirov looked like an accident, but the Golem stream is producing evidence of numerous time shifts by that ship. It was involved with that big shooting incident with the US 7th Fleet in the Pacific, and then presumed sunk again.”

  “But it wasn’t sunk,” said Paul. “It shifted again, and I think I may know why. We had another massive explosive event when that volcano went off, and that was very near the last reported position of that ship. Suppose the Russians were on to something Maeve. Suppose they were trying to test some means of moving in time, at sea, on a warship like Kirov. Then they had an accident just as it was reported on that submarine—a nuclear detonation, and that jives with all the research Robert was digging up on the Russian nuclear testing program. Suppose they have some kind of technology that is catalyzed or energized by these massive explosive events.

  “And the British?” said Maeve. “How to they pull off the same hat trick? It’s clear that no submarine sunk this Argos Fire off the coast of Greece as it was reported. We know very well where that ship went. The only question now is how it got there. You say Fairchild claimed it had something to do with this key?”

  “She said exactly that.”

  “And we strongly suspect the keys were engineered in the future,” Robert put in.

  “Correct,” said Paul, “but we still haven’t figured out what they have to do with these time fissures Fairchild mentioned. Here’s an idea. Suppose something happened, a massive explosive event. Lord knows there have been hundreds of them on earth through the history—asteroid strikes, super volcanoes, even earthquakes releasing massive amounts of energy. And in recent years we’ve had a spate of these occurrences. We had the big 9.1 off the coast of Sumatra in late 2004, then the 9.0 off the coast of Japan, and that had a nuclear spin to it as well.”